Siebel's BoldFish Buy Boosts E-Mail Offerings
CRM software vendor Siebel Systems Inc. will introduce an e-mail marketing solution this summer based on technology from BoldFish Inc., which Siebel purchased in mid-March.Siebel will integrate BoldFish's outbound messaging products into the newest version of Siebel Email Marketing, which will be available on its own or as an optional module with the Siebel Marketing product suite, its multichannel, permission-based marketing solution.
Though Siebel, San Mateo, CA, currently offers an in-house e-mail marketing solution, the BoldFish acquisition extends "our capabilities within our own product suite," said Kevin Colosimo, a group director in Siebel's marketing and analytics product line. "We evaluated build versus buy, and we felt like buying would get us to market faster and would also enhance our product from a capabilities standpoint."
Colosimo said BoldFish, Santa Clara, CA, will let Siebel "enhance and provide more flexible capabilities to support permission-based marketing in terms of flexible opt-in and opt-out techniques ... It would also bring industry-leading scalability and high-speed sending. Although we have a scalable outbound e-mail engine today, [BoldFish] offers industry-leading scalability that supports the needs of the largest consumer marketers."
The solution would include a bounced-message handler that automatically categorizes and differentiates "hard" from "soft" bounce types and processes bounced messages based on configurable rules.
Siebel Email Marketing also will include response tracking that lets organizations automatically follow metrics such as message open rates, opt-in and opt-out rates and unique click-throughs for embedded links within e-mails.
